‘Eid is just Christmas for Muslims’

Have you ever heard this phrase, or something like it? Perhaps you’ve used it yourself?

It’s easy enough to do, because currently that’s often how religious studies in primary school, and very often in secondary School is taught too.

We take each of the ‘main religions’ : Christianity (always Christianity first), Islam, Hinduism, sometimes Sikhi. We teach them in blocks: little silos where pupils get to understand what each religion believes, what gods they have, what religious book they read, the festivals they celebrate, how they do weddings and funerals, where they worship.

Judaism rarely gets a look in. After all, Moses, the prophecies, Noah’s Ark, the ‘Old’ Testament, Daniel and the Lions, they’ll all basically lead up to Jesus, don’t they?

Hinduism is the one the kids like best: all the colours, the Gods with funny heads, the strange chanting, all that fruit and burning incense.

Job done. Move on to the next religion after half-term.

I am, of course, exaggerating. But not by much.

In schools, I have seen tables where religions are compared by lining them up against each other in a table, with each column labeled God/Gods, Beliefs, Holy Book, Festivals, and more.

I call it ‘RE Lite’ - a skimming of the surface of religions, in order to squeeze in as much basic knowledge as possible, with no threat of going deeper, understanding more, or using any critical faculties at all.

And it is when you dig deeper that this surface-level analysis betrays itself not only as poor education, but actually very disrespectful of the traditions concerned.

Non-religious worldviews

First, where is atheism? The Pew Research Center indicates that non-religious individuals now outnumber Christians, with about 46% to 52% of the population identifying as non-religious. Among those sit not only those who don’t believe in God, but those who are spiritual in another way. https://humanists.uk/2025/03/26/non-religious-outnumber-chri...

How do those variations fit into our super table? What are their holy books, their Festivals? Secularism betrays the idea that worldviews can be compared and contrasted, like deciding what apples to buy at a supermarket.

Second, RE Lite relies on brutal generalisations. What is a Christian? Go into a Baptist Church or an Evangelical Church, and you’ll get a very different experience and set of beliefs, that if you went into a High Anglican or a Catholic Church. They pray differently; they have different festivals; they even have different versions of the Bible.

Islam has two main, quite different sects: Sunni and Shia. And Shia Islam further divides into three main sub-sects: Twelvers, Ismailis, and Zaidi.

The number of Hindu differences is untold, and can sometimes come down to the particular beliefs of a local mandir, which holds a particular god in reverence.

Stand a Hasidic Jew next to a Reform Jew, and even the visual difference between them betrays the errors of silos.

Thirdly, my particular topic of interest, the differences between Holy Canons (spoken and written holy scriptures).

Ask pupils to name the Holy Books of each religion, and they’re likely to recite them by rote: Christians (always Christians first) have the Bible, Muslims have the Qur’an, Hindus have the Vedas, Sikhis have the Guru Granth Sahib, Buddhists have the Tipitaka, and Jews have the… wait, the Old Testament?

We compare these books as if they’re just various versions of the same story, written in strange languages. We rarely pay attention to how different they are, nor the age and context in which they were written.

Mixed up time

A brief visit to the Vedas and the Guru Granth Sahib is a perfect example. Not only is Sikhi often regarded as ‘a kind of Hinduism’, their holy books ‘look the same’, are read in that kind of sing-song voice, and worshipers treat the book in a special way.

There’s no accounting that the Hindu Vedas were written nearly four thousand years ago, with some going back possibly 1,000 years before that.

The lifespan of the writing of the Vedas took at least as long as Christianity has existed in its entirety.

Indeed, the early Vedas have a very different perspective on the existence of the universe and god, than the Vedas written 1,000 years later. So different, in fact, that a close study might fairly conclude Hinduism has had at least two very different incarnations, if not more.

(Hinduism, by the way, is a term imposed by the West upon those who follow Hindu Dharma - because we do like our -isms to keep everything neat, and it’s a bit too much work to teach anything else. Likewise, with Sikhism, which is actually called Sikhi.)

Meanwhile, the Sikhi Guru Granth Sahib was first compiled in 1604, by the fifth holy guru Guru Arjan Dev in August of that year. In the same month, in London, King James I signed a pact with the Spanish to end 19 years of war.

The holy text was written, using relatively modern ink, on handmade paper. The early Vedas were scratched out on palm leaves. In just a few paragraphs, we’ve seen just how different these cannons are - yet we compare them side by side, as if choosing a mobile phone tariff.

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is the study of why religious canons (spoken stories, later written) emerged. Through it, we can learn of the context of the writings, the societal problems that emerged into oral stories, later into print, and what the holy scholars of the time were responding to in their writings.

Through analysis of these various holy scriptures, putting them into their own solid history and context, can we understand how different the religions and traditions we study are, how they emerged, and most importantly why.

And that means upsetting some.

We have to have tough conversations about how the Qur’an was written, edited, distributed, reclaimed, and redistributed because of the growth and change in Islamic traditions at the time.

That some revelations to Muhammad were included, then removed.

We have to challenge the idea that all the Bible is wholly unchanged, and unchangeable word of God, when we look at how different St Paul’s letters to the Corinthians are to his letters to the Romans, or the Ephesians.

He was answering the growing Christian community’s questions, deciding on the hoof how to answer their needs.

We have to rescue the Hebrew Bible from assumptions that it is a proto-Christian book. That the ‘Torah’ is only the first five books of Jewish scripture, the rest comprising the Nevi’im, and Ketuvim - (the TeNaKh), and that it contains some different books, and in different orders, to the Christian Old Testament.

And that Jews don’t read it as a preamble for the arrival of Jesus Christ.

A cause of prejudice?

It is often said that tension and even violence between religious traditions - and wider societal problems like prejudice against asylum seekers and terrorism - is born of misunderstandings and assumptions about ‘the other’, and what ‘they believe’.

I cannot help think our skimming the surface of religion, like comparing them in neat tables, with no reflection on the deep history, the differences within those religious traditions, their influences and modern representations, have a significant role to play in creating those tensions.

So, no, Eid is not just Christmas for Muslims. That is to ‘other’ Muslims, who have their own traditions, their own internal differences, their own way of doing things.

When we say a Hindu prays, we’re talking about something completely different than when we say a Jew prays, or a Sikhi prays, or a Muslim prays.

When we talk about a Hindu gods, or Allah, or God, or the Buddhist ‘Ultimate Reality’, or the Jewish god which many refuse to pronounce the name, we are not talking about different versions of the same thing.

The idea that ‘we all believe more or less the same thing in the end’, is the biggest crime in RE Lite.

We have to radically change the way we teach to avoid it.